Re: Grammar problems in gnomecal

[James Aylett <dj-gnome insigma com>]

On Tue, Aug 10, 1999 at 07:04:44PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:

> Quoting from the first message in this thread, here are a few of the
> problem translations:
> 
> > Recur on the 1st Monday   -- Povtor{ja}etsja v 1yj ponedel'nik
> > Recur on the 1st Thursday -- Povtor{ja}etsja v 1u{ju} sredu
> > Recur on the 2nd Thursday -- Povtor{ja}etsja vo 2u{ju} sredu
> 
> Notice that the translation of "1st" is dependent on the following word?

Ah, I didn't. I think the braces confused me.

> That is the problem.  Unless I am mistaken, libglade will not make this
> any easier.

That's true, but it does (I think) make many things easier, since it allows
the interface to be redesigned to fit the grammar of the new language - this
is something that cannot be achieved by gettext alone.

The way this sort of case appears to have been solved in the past is to have
different ids for the different cases (I think gnomecal uses d_Every,
w_Every, m_Every). It isn't very neat, but it should work in most cases.
Short of doing something hideously complex where you can specify
number-gender-case agreement options (and anything else which might be
needed) when you're looking up gettext id's, there doesn't seem to be an
alternative.

> Furthermore, the english rules for deciding on a suffix for
> the day number (st, nd, rd or th) may not map very well onto the target
> language.

Also true ... can someone give an example where ordinals aren't built using
prefixes or suffixes to cardinals? (The above doesn't look like it to me,
but I'm guessing, really.)

> This is a difficult problem.

The solution is going to have to grow in a special-cases, grotty-hack kind
of a way, as far as I can see ... :-/

James

-- 
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  James Aylett                                           www.zap.uk.eu.org
  james@tartarus.org                                    www.footlights.org